5 December 2025

11:45 AM – 12:30 PM

Amphi Petit Kursaal

Hervé Fischer

A multimedia artist-philosopher, Hervé Fischer initiated sociological art and today practices tweet art and tweet philosophy. His work has been shown in numerous international museums and biennials. The Centre Georges Pompidou devoted a retrospective to him, Hervé Fischer et l’art sociologique, in 2017. A digital pioneer in Quebec, in 1985 he founded the Cité des arts et des nouvelles technologies de Montréal, the first Café électronique in Canada, the International Multimedia Market, the International Federation of Multimedia Associations, the Téléscience festival and Science pour tous. His research focuses on art, the sociology of color, the digital, social imaginaries and hyperhumanism. He designed the Quebec medialab Hexagram. His publications include Théorie de l’art sociologique (1977), L’Histoire de l’art est terminée (1981), Le choc du numérique (2002), CyberProméthée, l’instinct de puissance (2003), La planète hyper, de la pensée linéaire à la pensée en arabesque (2004), La société sur le divan (2007), L’Avenir de l’art (2010), La divergence du futur (2014), La pensée magique du Net (2014), Market Art (2016), Les couleurs de l’Occident. From Prehistory to the 21st Century (2019), The Hyperhumanist Age. Pour une éthique planétaire (2019). He founded the International Society of Mythanalysis.

What is a li-myth?

A myth is an energy to which we give a name and which creates a narrative. This is true of nature or democracy. We imagine our relationship to the universe, to society, and to ourselves in this way, by reasoning and creating stories both globally and in detail. Thus, God creates stories with the Bible, and Artificial Intelligence—our greatest contemporary myth—with numerous programs and debates.
But beyond shared beliefs, knowledge, or reasoning, there always remains a blind passage beyond storytelling, linked to our psychic needs, such as discovering the enigma of the universe and life, make an utopian ideal real, or seizing human instrumental or spiritual power. It is this moment of tipping into the void, which leaves us without answers, that I call the border between the rational or belief and our awareness of the limits of our planetary condition, whether from an astrophysical, political, biological, spiritual or psychic point of view, that I call an insurmountable li-myth. The mythical narrative no longer provides for it. Fortunately, because this is where our indeterminism begins, therefore our freedom and our ethical responsibility which are our misery but also our human greatness.